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Editorial Reviews

VISITORS is the fourth collaboration of director Godfrey Reggio and composer Philip Glass together with filmmaker Jon Kane, advancing the film form pioneered by The Qatsi Trilogy (Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi): the non-spoken narrative experience where each viewer s response is radically different yet undeniably visceral. As Reggio explains, VISITORS is aimed at the solar plexus, at the appetite within us all, the atmosphere of our soul. I see the film as a meditation, as a transcendental event. Comprised of only seventy-four shots, a series of human, animal and landscape portraits, VISITORS takes movie watchers on an emotional journey to the moon and back. As a wondrous work of artistic achievement...art with a capital A (Austin Chronicle), VISITORS produces massive effects and moves into a class of film all its own.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

I won't go into the background of this film, either you are familiar with Godfrey Reggio or you're not. Suffice to say, while Visitors carries a lot of the recognizable DNA of his previous works like the Qatsi trilogy, it is a wholly different artistic experience. Visitors is meditative, slow, and far more of a focused experience. The thing that will instantly blow away anyone who has seen Reggio's previous works is the attention to the visuals. An insane amount of CGI is used in this movie to not only balance every image to look like traditional silver black-and-white film, but to also enhance the similarity between shots (especially the shots involving people). We're used to seeing CGI in movies to make giant monsters and explosions and all that, but this level of work to create uniform visuals is pretty mindblowing when you see it on screen. As something of a photography buff, I have to say each shot in this movie is utterly gorgeous.The movie is, of course, not for everyone. Much slower than the Qatsi films and with an inner meaning that is not entirely obvious. Anyone familiar with Reggio's work already knows that he is often sometimes bleakly critical of modern society and its dependence on technology. Visitors is making some comment on that, but the film's larger meaning is mostly vague and mysterious, which I think personally adds to its charm. The word "pretentious" has been thrown around in reviews both here and in the media, but there's nothing remotely pretentious about the movie...it's just obviously a very specific work of art that demands more attention than what normally passes for cinema these days. Initially, the film kinda baffled me, but then it slowly began to work it's magic on me and I realized how truly masterful it was.

Five stars not so much as compared to the entirety of cinema, but because it is a must see. This is gallery art, that is, it has no real story line, but is more of an audio-visual experience. People who state it "fails" as a movie in the traditional sense are absolutely right but, I think, miss the point of this work.

On the visuals: The vast majority of the scenes are super-slow motion of people and time lapse of the landscape, they are both exceptionally fine detailed and beautifully rendered in black and white--Ansel Adams would be proud. Prolific use of apparent infrared sensors on trees (making green leaves pure white) and ultra high contrast on the outdoor scenes gives a striking effect, but it's strangeness compared to the faithfully reproduced images of people's faces was a little puzzling to me. We are given lots of time to examine the expressions of the people, especially the children, in a way that is rare in cinema. The scenes are akin to the "slow people" candid street scenes in Koyannisqatsi and Baraka, but here we have studio shots, professionally set up and staged. So they lose a context and force the viewer to create one. I think that's what Reggio had in mind. It forces the audience to create their own story line, if they feel a need for one.

On the audio: Philip Glass has created some of his finest work here. He has tempered his minimalist style with Richard Strauss-like lush orchestration, transitions similar to Wagner opera and harmony reminding us of Anton Bruckner. In fact, 2 or 3 minutes of the score seemed like it could have been written by Bruckner. The result is coherent, a symphony related to but not a slave to the visuals.Read more ›

A masterpiece of nonsense converted into a gem of incalculable visual poeticness. Let the power of your mind take command of your eyes. See with your subconscious and let it transport you to countless avenues of feeling and thought.Visitors just is; An unexplainable conjuring of breathtaking compositions. The crash course to find the empathic value in the expressions of others. The life of many through the eyes of another. A decadent facade of unoriginal thoughts which is prone for rediscover.Motionless and yet so alive. That is Visitors and it is undoubtedly not what i have just described.

For me, conventional movies work best if I know almost nothing going in. Visitors is the exact opposite. Godfrey and Phillip explain why. The purpose of Visitors is to allow each person in the audience to provide their own individual meaning to the film. The images are remote, the music is the bridge to access the images. Those are almost direct quotes. For me, Visitors achieves maybe 90% of its purpose.

Maybe another way to describe Visitors is like this: Imagine you are trying to do the very first painting in your life. The most important thing is that you want your painting to mean something. So first you try to start with a blank canvas. But that's too hard, its too empty, there's too many possibilities. So then you try with a paint-by-numbers kit. But that's too simple, it's too inflexible, it already has a meaning different from yours. Visitors is at the middle point, between a blank canvas and a paint-by-numbers kit.

My first thought with the images in Visitors was "This *really* needs to be in color." But that's wrong. In fact, my idea about color came from the extraordinary beauty of the B/W images. Several of the outdoor scenes were shot in infrared, which gives them an other-worldly beauty. The portraits are as beautiful as any portraits in the Koyaanisqatsi line, or the Baraka line. Visitors seems unique in the way a portrait first begins as a static picture, and is then transformed by slow motion into eloquent human expression. Words can't really describe it.

The music is another aspect of Visitors which is a lot different from most films. The interviews say it best. Basically, the music doesn't interpret the images. The music doesn't lead the audience around by the hand.Read more ›